By Larry Schwartz
DAVID Bromberg made sure the bootleggers had no access to an album he once produced for Bob Dylan.
“I took the masters home with me every night,” says the multi-instrumentalist, who had years earlier backed Dylan on tracks for New Morning and Self Portrait as well as some songs used on Columbia’s 1973 Dylan compilation. “So nobody could get at them.”
Bromberg plays instruments including guitar, dobro, mandolin, and fiddle on albums by artists including Willie Nelson, Carly Simon and Bonnie Raitt and recorded a song he’d co-written with George Harrison at a Thanksgiving Dinner hosted by his then manager Al Aronowitz on his 1971 debut album.
Now 66, he once led blind Reverend Gary Davis to gigs and church in lieu of payment for lessons. He quit in 1980 to study violin making and repairs and sells the instrument at his store in Wilmington, Delaware.
“I was touring at an unreasonable rate and I got burned out,” he says. “But I was too stupid to recognise it as burnout… If I had taken nine months off, I would have come back.”
The Grammy-nominated Try Me One More Time in 2007 was his first album in 17 years. It featured a Dylan track, It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, he’d played with Dylan at a 1997 Chicago concert.
Dylan might have appeared on last year’s Use Me, for which he invited songwriters including John Hiatt, Guy Clark and David Hidalgo, to each contribute a new song. “…I mentioned to him that I was doing something like this and if he had wanted to participate I expect he would have figured it out and told me.”
With a version of Jimmie Rodgers’ Miss the Mississippi and You among the few to have been released, Dylan enthusiasts have been left wondering about the 30 tracks recorded with Bromberg and his band in June 1992.
Dylan chronicler, Michael Gray, has written that, judging by some of the tracks – Bromberg’s Kaatskills Serenade and (Bromberg’s favourite from the sessions), Polly Vaughan , a ballad collected by the 19th century ethnomusicologist, Francis J. Child – “this really is the great lost Dylan album”.
“Which was mine,” laughs Bromberg, who backed Dylan with members of his own band and, on some tracks, a gospel choir that included his artist wife, Nancy.
Gray has written that mostly at Dylan’s insistence “an almost absurd proportion” of the songs were either written by Bromberg or from his repertoire. “Perhaps Dylan felt that it had turned into a David Bromberg album; perhaps not,” he writes.
“But for whatever reason, having asked Bromberg to mix a few tracks – six or seven, apparently – he heard the mixes, hated them and promptly abandoned the entire album.”
“The last part of that is correct,” says Bromberg, on the eve of his first Australian tour since the 1970s.
“He didn’t like the mixes and when he talked to me about it I realised that he was correct. They weren’t the kind of mixes that he likes and I should have (realised). It was hard for me to know better. He left for Europe and said, I always participate in the mixes but I think you can do it and I’ll just leave you to do it.
“With Bob there is rarely such a thing as a second chance. He said, go back and listen to the roughs. And I saw what he meant. And I also realised something about two of his early albums. You know how, Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited have a unique sound on them. That’s because they are rough mixes. That’s what that sound is.”
Does he agree with Gray that this might be Dylan’s great lost album? “I think it had some really good things on it. As to what he said about Bob being afraid it was David Bromberg album, the one who was afraid of that was me.
“Bob wanted to do tunes that I had recorded and written and in a way I was relieved that it wasn’t put out because I’m sure that people would say Bromberg made Dylan do his tunes. Of course, you don’t make Bob do shit. You know, he does what he wants. And he wanted to do my tunes and tunes that I had recorded. It was very flattering.”
“He told me specific ones he wanted to do and he wanted to do one that at the time I was angry at. This is a peculiar thing. But I will sometimes get angry at songs of mine and … I just didn’t want to participate in the re-recording of this tune.”
Which one was that? “You know I don’t think I should get into it any further than that…”
Larry Schwartz Writer 